Fields-Black

Edda Fields-Black will be the keynote speaker at the inaugural Dr. Maurice C. Taylor ’72 Lecture on Social Justice at 6:30 p.m. Monday, March 3, in Alumni Hall, Brumbaugh Academic Center, at Juniata College, 1700 Moore St., Huntingdon.

The event is free and open to the public.

Fields-Black will discuss her new book, “Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War,” which offers the fullest account to date of Tubman’s Civil War service as a cook, nurse, scout and spy, as well as her heroic leadership in a Union military operation. Her narrative tells the untold story of the Combahee River Raid, in which Union ships rescued and transported more than 750 former enslaved people who had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation five months earlier.

A professor in the Department of History and director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University, Fields-Black is also the author of “Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora” and co-author of “Rice: Global Networks and New Histories.”